NCIS over the years has been through numerous cast changes. In fact, no one on the cast in its 21st season was a series regular for its first. But the actor who has been there the longest is Sean Murray, who first played Timothy McGee (he was a probie!) in Season 1, Episode 7 “Sub Rosa.” But he only recurred throughout the first season, and his journey to becoming a series regular was “an interesting one,” as he tells TV Insider (ahead of a turn in his character’s life, with McGee learning he has a relative he never knew about in the March 25 episode).
Murray’s stepfather, Donald Bellisario, created NCIS and Murray had worked with him on JAG. (NCIS is a spinoff of JAG.) “There was a one-time guest star appearance for a rookie agent. Don asked me if I wanted to do this. It was an interesting character, total rookie, total kind of stumbling over himself, trying to learn what he’s doing sort of thing,” Murray shares. “It goes well, I get along with everyone. We finished the end of that episode, and my character is neither a bad guy nor arrested nor killed, which is a good sign.”
He was brought back when they were three minutes short on an episode soon after that. Someone said, “Let’s bring McGee back, put him with Tony [Michael Weatherly] because that worked really well when we did that in that episode,” he recalls. He became a series regular for Season 2.
It was soon after that, at the end of the second season and leading into the third that the cast “felt like we were onto something,” he says. “We were still trying to find our footing, and we did something pretty heavy duty at the end of Season 2: Our female lead, Caitlin Todd, played by Sasha Alexander, took a bullet in the head. We kept that a secret because we wanted that to be a surprise when it aired, and people really were surprised by that. Between the end of Season 2 and Season 3, a lot of interest started to drum up with the show, and I think that was part of it, knowing that we were doing things a little differently than a lot of network television shows would. Cote de Pablo came aboard Season 3, and as we got going during that season, we could feel things picking up and things were clicking and the audience was starting to come and hang with us.”
While NCIS has ended seasons as the number one show, “which is amazing how many times that’s happened, we try not to think about that too much,” according to Murray. “I know that’s funny, but it’s also something that was sort of instilled in us early because you don’t want to get complacent. If people are tuned in and invested, you want to make sure to keep bringing the goods, you really do, even more so than usual. So we feel a responsibility to keep the quality high, and we always have. Twenty-one years later, we’re still hopefully doing that.”